Samacom celebrates third anniversary

At its third anniversary, Samacom, the broadcasting arm of Dubai Holding, announced that it had leased a second transponder on the Nilesat 102 satellite to support the growing demand for broadcast services from its clients.

Samacom, the broadcasting arm of Dubai Holding, celebrated its third anniversary along with some of the region’s most significant broadcast players. The guest list included representatives from Arab Digital Distribution (ADD), BBC World, MBC, Reuters, CNBC Arabiya, Showtime, Spacetoon, Nilesat, Arabsat, Dubai TV, ART and Alaqariyah. At the event, Samacom also announced that it had leased a second transponder on the Nilesat 102 satellite to support the growing demand for broadcast services from its clients. “Samacom has worked hard in the first three years of its existence and operates world-class services to the broadcasters in the Middle East,” Najla Al-Shihhe, marketing manager of Samacom said. “We haven’t just created the largest teleport in the region; we have also provided the major players here with the backup and support they needed. This has not just been a birthday celebration for us but an opportunity to bring together the regional elite of the broadcasting set together,” she added. The increasing demand for Samacom’s services has led it to take a second fully-operational transponder on the Nilesat 102 satellite. This now brings Samacom’s total of uplinks to nine transponders on Nilesat; one for Dubai TV, three for Showtime and five for MBC. “We have activated this transponder with Nilesat to properly manage the steady growth of satellite services and operations in the Middle East. At the moment, we are seeing the number of homes across the Middle East and Africa increasing by 8%, year on year. We are also catering to the increased compound annual growth rate of the satellite and broadcast industry in Eastern Europe of 13.5% and the subcontinent of 13.9%,” added Al-Shihe. According to Pricewaterhouse Coopers, 6,155,000 homes in the Middle East will be using satellite services by 2005.